Donald J. Mastronarde

Previous Librarything reviewer Baviv aptly describes Mastronarde's approach as: "Holy crap. A bare- knuckled approach to learning a language." I recently finished reading Mastronarde's textbook and I can only agree with this statement. My experience reading the textbook as a Classics graduate student quite a few years after studying the language for the first time was that of an intensive grammatical review that is just not possible to do through other, more first-time-learner-friendly texts such as Athenaze or JACT's Reading Greek.

In my opinion, I would recommend the book to students as a supplementary text to help out with fine points of grammar, as a light, explanatory reference guide, complete with practice exercises, for a Greek student at the second or third year level, or as an introduction for students who already know Latin quite well. I do not expect this text would be a good introduction for the general first-time learner with no prior linguistic experience, and I doubt I would teach a first year Greek class with it myself, or at very least, using it as the sole text. It might however serve either in class or to the autodidact as an excellent supplement to some other introductory text, like Athenaze, that is weaker on its grammatical presentation. In spite of this flaw, it is impossible to ignore the fact that this is still an excellent, solid, concise, and well-graded presentation of Greek grammar, and it is superbly written. (4.5/5)… (mere)